


Low Blow

by Empatheia



Category: Air Master (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Bisexuality, F/F, Foe Yay, Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 09:46:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18206825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empatheia/pseuds/Empatheia
Summary: Aikawa Maki pays her debts.





	Low Blow

**Author's Note:**

> It makes me sad that there are so few works for this absurdly fun series, and that none of them thus far mention Kaori. I found her so delightfully messy and raw in ways women aren't often allowed to be while still remaining sympathetic. The fact that her miserable "showdown" with Maki was essentially the emotional climax of the anime made me love it a lot more than I otherwise might have. 
> 
> Anyway, here's a thing for any forlorn Air Master fans out there, if you still exist.

Sakiyama Kaori ignored the first two knocks on her door. She was used to being pestered by fans. Many of them also happened to be solicitors, which was annoying, but such was the price of fame.

The third knock nearly took the door off its hinges.

Startled, she let the magazine fall from her fingers to splay messily on the floor at her feet, creasing the page with her spread. She picked it up, cursing, smoothed the page out with a murmured apology to her own smirking face, and set it on the coffee table before getting up to see who her remarkably rude visitor was.

It was, to her immense shock, Aizawa Maki.

"Yo," said Maki.

She had her arm braced against the top of the door frame to support her casual lean, and it actually did look comfortable. Not for the first time, and not likely for the last, Kaori noted how disgustingly tall she was. Did she even drink milk? Kaori had, by the litre, when she was still growing. Yet here she was, insultingly dwarfed.

"A-Air Master," she stammered. "What-- Why--"

Maki gave her a smile. Not a grin, and certainly not a smirk; just a soft smile, one that could almost be mistaken for fond. At least by someone less canny than Kaori was. No, that smile was an assault, intended to throw her off guard before the battle even started. Psychological warfare. A low blow.

Effective, of course. Her blood heated.

"I remembered something," said Maki. "Are you going to let me in?"

Despite herself, Kaori stepped back and let her in.

Meticulously polite as ever, Maki removed her shoes at the entrance before moving further into the apartment. Her presence there was all wrong, too much, an invasion that Kaori had not been remotely prepared for. She couldn't wrap her mind around the Air Master standing here in her apartment, looking around with an air of casual interest, fiery head alarmingly close to the ceiling. She couldn't cope with the Air Master's bare feet on her carpet, bent and scarred toes incongruous against the immaculate low-pile cream.

"So--"

"I remembered," Maki interrupted, "that I owe you a kiss."

Kaori stared at her, open-mouthed, all pretense at poise and professionalism gone in the space of two syllables.

Oh, she remembered. She'd been remembering almost non-stop since the words had reached her ears, back in that crumbling tunnel of concrete and old misery. That had been a smirk on the Air Master's face, then. Wry and affectionate and far more than Kaori had been able to process, at the time or at any time since. She remembered. She didn't know what to do, now.

Maki blushed a little and ducked her head. "Come on," she said, "I'm embarrassed enough already without you staring at me like--"

"You were serious?" Kaori interrupted faintly, then shook her head. "No. There's no way you were serious. You were just messing with me, like always."

A faint look of confusion flickered across the Air Master's face. "Messing with you? I've never messed with you. You're the one who's always messing with me."

That was so patently wrong that Kaori didn't know how to begin to correct it, but she realized that she didn't want to. At least, not right now. Setting the Air Master straight could -- just this once -- wait for some other time.

"You were serious?" she repeated, incredulous.

Maki took one step closer to her. Her legs being as long as they were, that step took her from a safe distance away to right up in Kaori's personal space. Her eyes, grey as shadowed water, looked down into Kaori's from much, much too close. "No," she admitted quietly. "I just said it without thinking. But then I saw your face, and I kept thinking about it, and... here I am." She made a gesture with her lean arms that encompassed the whole of the apartment, and the whole of Kaori.

The blush racing across Kaori's skin felt like a wildfire, searing and vicious and out of control. She resented being made to lose her composure like this — resenting it was what had made her so obsessed with the Air Master in the first place — but at the same time there was an awful thrill to it. She could never seem to be poised, perfect, adult Sakiyama Kaori in front of this wild animal of a girl. She could only be the Kaori underneath, the ferociously ambitious girl who had decided on her dream despite discouragement from others and pursued it with all the merry disregard of a dog chasing a bird already half in flight.

She didn't like to remember being that girl. There were no victories under that girl's belt, no admirers at her door, no reason to believe she was anything special beyond her own burning conviction that she was meant for greatness. Being that girl made her feel bare and vulnerable, but also vital and young again, and it was intoxicating and terrible.

Oh, how she wanted to beat the girl standing too close to her. She wanted to destroy the Air Master, unmake her, show her for the ordinary and unthreatening little girl she surely was underneath. She'd never wanted anything more in her life. She'd spent months, almost years now, chasing after the diminishing back of the one person who had dared make her feel like this. She'd trade her soul for one clear victory.

Trouble was, she wanted the Air Master to kiss her right now even more than she wanted that.

Bigger trouble was, it seemed likely that she was actually about to get what she wanted for once, and she had no idea what to do about that, either.

"Well, then?" her mouth said imperiously, entirely without asking permission.

Kaori opted to just roll with it, and put her hands on her hips and stuck her chest out for good measure. Best to hold onto what tattered remnants of dignity she had left to her. Never surrender. It wasn't over yet.

Then, abruptly, it was over.

Maki cradled her face between her strong, long-fingered hands, gave her that crookedly fond smile again, and kissed her.

It was, to put it bluntly, simultaneously the best and most humiliating moment of Sakiyama Kaori's life. She was abruptly glad that it was at least not her first kiss, though it wasn't far off; still in the single digits. Which was something she would not be telling anyone even on pain of torture, of course. Beautiful as she was, charismatic and vivacious as she was, there weren't many men out there who could keep up with her long enough to get to that stage.

Belatedly, she wondered if perhaps she'd been looking at the wrong half of the population for that.

The Air Master was kissing her, and it was nothing, nothing like the others. There had been cautious, self-effacing pecks from the men who felt like they ought to at least try, and belligerent tooth-breakers from the men who had wanted to break her down, and one surprise from a man who'd chosen kissing her out of nowhere as his ill-advised method of confession, but none of... these. None of this. Nothing even like this.

It was clumsy, but unhesitating; Maki clearly had little experience, but she knew what she meant to do and she was doing it, which counted for something. It was soft and unhurried. Worst of all, it was absolutely chock-full of genuine affection.

Kaori hadn't realized what a devastating absence it had been in every other kiss, without anything like this to compare it to. None of those men had actually liked her, she realized now, and her heart was simultaneously breaking and healing within the protective cage of Maki's hands. Some of them had liked their idea of her; either liked the thought of dating a model, or liked the thought of getting stepped on by someone who liked stepping on them. Some of them had just liked the idea of conquering her, when she was so loud about being unconquerable. None of them had actually paid much attention to who she was. None of them had liked her.

The Air Master liked her. The Air Master, it was painfully clear, cared about her. Aizawa Maki, a girl ten years her junior, saw her in a way no one else ever had.

Kaori was very worried that she was going to cry.

Desperate to avoid that final humiliation, she furrowed her brow and distracted the Air Master by aggressively slipping her the tongue.

Maki startled, unprepared, but didn't push her away.

Unfortunately.

Thankfully.

Winding her arms around Maki's neck, Kaori pressed the narrow length of her lean body -- model's body, fighter's body -- against her opponent's. Maki's breasts were small and dense with muscle. Kaori's were nicer, so she pushed them up into Maki's to show off, though Maki didn't seem to notice. Instead, the Air Master's hands were sliding down the sides of her neck, then her back. She wasn't rushing, just exploring. Discovering.

Kaori twisted her fingers into Maki's jagged mop of reddish hair, holding her fast, relishing the tiny shiver she could feel running over Maki's scalp down her spine.

Perhaps this, at long last, was a battle she could win.

**X**

**Author's Note:**

> I can't wait until my team and I get around to translating the manga. The anime was a lot of fun, but there's no way it covered all twenty-eight volumes of the manga's plot.


End file.
